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Lucie Brock-Broido was born on May 22, 1956, in Pittsburgh. She received her BA and her MA from Johns Hopkins University, as well as her MFA from Columbia University. Her books of poetry include Stay, Illusion (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), Trouble in Mind (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), The Master Letters (1995), and A Hunger (1988).

In a New York Times review of Trouble in Mind, Maureen N. McLane wrote: "Apprenticed to Wallace Stevens, from whose notebooks she takes the titles of several poems, she writes a sensual, sonically rich poetry, typified by the opening of 'Spain': 'The god-leash leaves / Its lashes on the broad bunched backs / Of sacrificial animals.' This acoustic gorgeousness, along with her highly figurative cast of mind, creates a striking tension: her new theme is austerity, yet her means remain profligate."

Her awards and honors include the Witter-Bynner prize from the Academy of American Arts and Letters, the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, the Harvard-Danforth Award for Distinction in Teaching, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Guggenheim fellowship.

Brock-Broido has taught at Bennington College, Princeton University, and at Harvard University as the director of the creative writing program and as the Briggs-Copeland poet. She is now the director of poetry in the writing division of Columbia University's School of the Arts. She divides her time between New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A Meadow

Lucie Brock-Broido, 1956

What was it I was hungry about. Hunger, it is one
Of the several contraptions I can turn on the off-button to at will.
Yes, yes, of course it is an "Art." Of course I will not be here
Long, not the way the percentages are going now.
He might have been
Half-beautiful in a certain optic nerve
Of light, but legible only at particular
Less snowy distances. I was fixed on
The poplar and the dread. The night was lung-colored
And livid still—he would have my way
With me. In this district of late
Last light, indicated by the hour of
The beauty of his neck, his face Arabian in contour
Like a Percheron grazing in his dome of grass,
If there is a god, he is not done
Yet, as if continuing to manhandle the still lives of
The confederate dead this far north, this time of year, each
Just a ghostly reason now. There are reasons: One,
Soon the wind will blow Pentecostal with the power of group prayer.
Two: the right to bear arms. Three: you did not find my empathy
Supernatural, at the very least.
—Have you any ideas that are new?
I was fixed on the scythe and the harlequin, on the priggish
Butcher as he cuts the tender loin and
When I saw this spectacle, I wanted to live for a moment for
A moment. However inelegant it was,
It was what it might have been to be alive, but tenderly.
One thing. One thing. One thing:
Tell me there is
A meadow, afterward.

Lucie Brock-Broido

by this poet

All about Carrowmore the lambs
Were blotched blue, belonging.
They were waiting for carnage or
Snuff. This is why they are born
To begin with, to end.
Ruminants do not frighten
At anything--gorge in the soil, butcher
Noise, the mere graze of predators.

Don’t do that when you are dead like this, I said,Arguably still squabbling about the word inarguably.I haunt Versailles, poring through the markets of the medieval.Mostly meat to be sold there; mutton hangsLike laundry pinkened on its line. And gold!—a chalice with a cure

Winter was the ravaging in the scarified
Ghost garden, a freak of letters crossing down a rare
Path bleak with poplars. Only the yew were a crewel
Of kith at the fieldstone wall, annulled
As a dulcimer cinched in a green velvet sack.
To be damaged is to endanger—taut as

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What was it I was hungry about. Hunger, it is one
Of the several contraptions I can turn on the off-button to at will.
Yes, yes, of course it is an "Art." Of course I will not be here
Long, not the way the percentages are going now.
He might have been

What was it I was hungry about. Hunger, it is one
Of the several contraptions I can turn on the off-button to at will.
Yes, yes, of course it is an "Art." Of course I will not be here
Long, not the way the percentages are going now.
He might have been